[user104658]

Originally Posted by ThomasC

My point that I was trying to make is that often the woman will win custodial battles and actually the child can be used as a weapon in such cases. The mother might be the primary caregiver because they haven't allowed that child access to their father or restricted it.

Edit; you say no stats there have been two very big case file reviews that I know of where a baby or child has died at the hands of their mother from abuse.

Where the mother was previously known by authorities to be abusive but had court-ordered unsupervised access to the child against the wishes of their primary caregiver? I didn't say children have never been harmed by abusive mothers. I said KNOWN abusive fathers are often granted unsupervised, over-night access to children on the grounds of parental alienation (which you have succinctly described in the bit in bold above).

The reason that the mother is usually the primary caregiver is that they're far more likely to have given up work to be the primary carer ... which is another discussion entirely, and not particularly the "fault" of either partner, just a sad quirk of patriarchal norms.

The point remains that the reason custody is usually granted to women is because they are in 90% of cases the child's usual primary carer and this causes the least disruption, NOT "because they are female". It's an overly-simplistic way of looking at it.